This is further proof that the left knows Bernie Sanders can’t win in a general election. VOX is the “news explaining” site which was launched by the progressive journalist Ezra Klein when he left the Washington Post.

Study: Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan is almost twice as expensive as he says

Bernie Sanders’s health care plan is underfunded by almost $1.1 trillion a year, a new analysis by Emory University health care expert Kenneth Thorpe finds.

Thorpe isn’t some right-wing critic skeptical of all single-payer proposals. Indeed, in 2006 he laid out a single-payer proposal for Vermont after being hired by the legislature, and was retained by progressive Vermont lawmakers again in 2014 as the state seriously considered single-payer, authoring a memo laying out alternative ways to expand coverage. A 2005 report he wrote estimated that a single-payer system would save $1.1 trillion in health spending from 2006 to 2015.

But he nonetheless concludes that single-payer at a national level would be significantly more expensive than the Sanders campaign believes, and would require workers to pay an additional 20 percent of their compensation in taxes. He also argues it would leave 71 percent of households with private insurance worse off once you take both tax increases and reduced health care expenditures into account.

Sanders’s camp is, naturally, skeptical. Sanders’s policy director Warren Gunnels told me Thorpe’s analysis is a “total hatchet job.” The disagreement ultimately comes down to a question of how optimistic you are about single-payer’s ability to reduce health care spending.

If you want to know how well single payer healthcare works, look no further than Sanders’ home state of Vermont.

Vermont was supposed to be the beacon for a single-payer health care system in America. But now its plans are in ruins, and its onetime champion Gov. Peter Shumlin may have set back the cause.

Advocates of a “Medicare for all” approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn’t even include a weaker “public option” government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones.

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